Opera is not for entry-level art patrons. Generally, it’s something you dabble in only after mastering theater, orchestra concerts, show tunes, music videos, and punk rock. When you finally arrive at the altar of a 225-pound operatic Valkyrie, well, it’s sort of like what Richard Gere said to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman: “Those who love it will always love it. Those who hate it might come to appreciate it, but they’ll never truly love it.”
Years after seeing Pretty Woman—and, thank heavens, listening to La Bohème on my bedroom stereo (I knew Mimi had tuberculosis, but I didn’t expect her to sound like a calf at the slaughterhouse), I now know that Gere’s line is only half-true. Sure, operatic singing immediately grabs some and repels others, but there are built-in obstacles to appreciating this art form. Pre-recorded and portable music, for one, reigns in our era; and as I learned with Mimi, the acoustic power of opera doesn’t translate well to recordings. One cannot fall in love with Puccini via MP3.
Above all, would-be opera lovers need to feel welcomed to their seats. As it is, opera is snobby. It’s expensive. If the music doesn’t put you off, the ticket price and pageantry just might. The story of how American opera got so plumped up with pomp is a hundred-plus-year-old tale, peopled by nouveau riche who liked the idea of an exclusionary art form. No doubt, their hoity-toity traditions carry on in many ways; the pie charts for Minnesota Opera’s current audience demographics, for example, paint a picture of a rich, mostly white crowd with graduate degrees.
But elsewhere, there are hints that opera’s bodice is about to burst into populism. For starters, recent smaller, more intimate productions like Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s Maria de Buenos Aires or Theater Latté Da’s La Boheme drew sell-out crowds of casual theatergoers and avant-garde types wearing obscure denim labels. I recently watched a young man with a red mohawk bound up the stairs at Jeune Lune to get a good seat, his wallet chain jingling against his pocket change (no one seemed surprised about him but me). Outside the theaters, bars are hosting opera recitals; a duo known as “Opera Babes” is making hit records; a gargantuan production of Carmina Burana is on a nationwide stadium tour; and—my favorite—classically trained singers are performing “hip-hopera,” operatic odes to Eminem and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. (Here’s hoping a Twin Cities station will pick up this trend, which currently flourishes on a hip-hop station in New York City).
It’s hard to pinpoint when this opera boom began, but the first leap toward the form’s democratization came in the 1980s and 1990s, with the advent of supertitles, which are much like foreign-film subtitles, but projected above the stage in huge type. For the first time, American audiences had a play-by-play translation of French, German, and Italian librettos—and thus an understanding of how truly sensational, even downright trashy, most opera stories are.
Then, in 1997, a National Endowment for the Arts study made a shocking discovery: Opera fans aren’t dying. In fact, the median age of an opera patron was on par with the fashionable theatergoing set and slightly younger than classical music concertgoers (all of whom hover in their mid-forties). Looking more closely at their forty-, thirty-, even twentysomething audience base, many opera companies “rebranded” themselves with sexy ad campaigns and edgier productions. Minnesota Opera even spawned a “Young Professionals Group,” which is just an urbane thing to call a singles club.
During this same time, small-scale opera productions started cropping up across the country. They were—and continue to be—revolutionary in many ways, but their key value is that they get people up close and personal with the noisemakers, which is essential to falling in love with the form. (Here, folks of modest means can afford the front-row seats.) Minnesota is home to one of the nation’s sexiest mini-opera booms, thanks in large part to Theatre de la Jeune Lune artistic director Dominique Serrand and his preferred troupe: a dashing baritone named Bradley Greenwald and the beautiful, crooning Baldwin sisters; but credit is also due to North Star Opera and Theater Latté Da.
Anecdotally, attendance at traditional theater productions appears to be flat, but opera shows, both big and small, are making bank. Both Jeune Lune’s Maria de Buenos Aires and Latté Da’s La Bohème had extended, sold-out runs; on the more traditional end of the spectrum, Minnesota Opera sells upward of ninety percent of its seats available in an average season. Of course, opera performances are not nearly as abundant as those for theater, but clearly arts patrons are flocking to the few opera options available to them.
For many Americans, operatic singing sounds as unnatural as Italian bluegrass or French rap. In the U.S., our ear for music is inevitably shaped by our own rich vocal traditions, spanning rock, country, blues, jazz, and hip-hop. Tying these disparate, homegrown forms together are vocal techniques that tend toward intimacy and “throatiness.” Operatic singing, on the contrary, originates from places deeper in the body. Quite literally, young girls training as opera singers are told to sing from their vaginas (look closely and you occasionally will see a soprano holding herself there during her highest Cs). Aside from that gendered extreme, most musicians would agree that opera vocals originate in the abdomen, as opposed to rock music, which is more from the throat or the head.
These techniques can make opera sound inflated and piercing, especially to those who came of age listening to pop. So why are legions of younger Americans cozying up to that blaring sound now? The folks I know in the opera biz are effusive about the “heightened emotion” that colors opera, referring to the unrestrained, full-body effort operatic singing requires. Those of us with broader musical palates, however, usually find that operatic singing sounds no more or less emotional than, say, Johnny Rotten snarling his way through “God Save the Queen.”
However, once I found myself five hundred feet from Bradley Greenwald as he sang the “Flower Song,” during Jeune Lune’s Carmen, it hit me: Operatic singing is vastly more athletic than other forms. It involves—and exhausts—every muscle, every nerve of the body. As Greenwald’s voice overtook him, his jaw trembled; his chest vibrated; his knees quivered. That’s not to say that a good punk-rock frontman doesn’t work up an honest sweat, but an opera tenor, for example, stands at the edge of what human bodies can do. His effort is poured exclusively into his voice. For a male singer to maintain that high vocal range for three hours while also cutting through an eighty-five-piece orchestra unamplified is nothing short of Olympic.
That sort of endurance singing certainly can be emotionally over the top, but it’s not the sort of passion easily recognized by an ear tuned to pop. Whether a fortissimo communicates anger or lust, for example, we opera converts may never discern from our third-tier balcony seats. We just know it’s loud—and that’s good. In fact, what we greenhorns love in our opera, what keeps us going back for more, are those earsplitting arias and muscular, triple-axel staccatos. Here in Minnesota, those with a penchant for aural flashiness are particularly blessed with Minnesota Opera, an organization that entertains a rare fascination with bel canto, an eighteenth-century Italian opera style with vocal arrangements so dense and so busy, they’d make Beyoncé dizzy.
Some opera directors credit the so-called MTV generation, which grew up watching visual representations of music, with rediscovering opera. While, in my mind, watching a four-minute Whitesnake video doesn’t exactly lend itself to an appreciation for a four-hour Wagner production, there does seem to be some kind of
correlation. The ADD generation, as I prefer to call it, needs total sensory stimulation. We’re bored with singer-songwriters who stand onstage like a sack of potatoes, seemingly as unimpressed with their music as we are. We’ve exhausted our tolerance for text-heavy theater in which actors holler at each other without ever bringing so much as a slouch to their mannered, ramrod postures. If we’re going to be entertained for two, three, even four hours, there had better be something in it for the eyes and ears. Opera offers that: The singing is electric. The costumes and sets are awe-inspiring. The passions burn hot. (Yes, there have been opera productions in which women do a version of the bump and grind on or near the hoods of automobiles, as in those classic Whitesnake videos.)
There’s also a novelty, a throwback anti-hipness about opera. The singers are burly. The stage directions are shameful, basically just variations on shuffling the fifty-man chorus on and off stage. And the antiquated stories—let’s be frank here, since the operas we like best predate our grandparents—are unburdened with the concern for subtly that plagues contemporary art. Fathers lose their minds over their daughters’ lost virginities. Husbands in disguise madly track down wandering wives. Lovers belt out hardcore finales just seconds before dropping dead. It’s grand, indeed—no wonder the rich folks have been hoarding this stuff.
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